Reading Emily

I had no intention of reading Emily for hours, but in the letters, I stumbled on the line "November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.". So I read for a few more hours. She takes walks, entertains a few friends, bakes bread, tends her flowers. She writes incessantly, and bitches when people don't write back immediately. I can read at the island, while I cook, so after the cookstove is fired move over there, start the roast, prep the vegetables. Foreshortened time, but over the course of hours, I braise the roast and roast the vegetables, mix them together. The liquid has become something special. I love root vegetables anyway, but simmered in that liquid, turnips and parsnips become transcendent. Seriously. A pone of corn bread might provide the key. Assume you thought you knew what you were doing, all I have to do is split wood tomorrow. Easy enough. In many ways, a man is judged by his woodpile. Read until dawn, then napped for a couple of hours, awakened by the rattle of wind-blown leaves. It's too dreary to go outside, so I make a huge breakfast and resume reading. The Tuchman book on the 14th century is 700 pages of small type and will take me a while, but it's not a novel and doesn't require a reading straight through, so I intersperse my time with the history of cheese making in America and Emily. She often signed her name Emilee until 1858-1860. A wonderful thing happens for me when I read her now, in that whenever I reread a section we used in the performance piece, I hear Linda's voice and Zack playing TR's music. An unexpected transport. Written word becoming something more, an audio-visual experience. It's always interesting to hear an author's voice, the parsing. It's not necessary, for a close reading, but it helps. Linda does Emily so well, it's like an introduction into the inner circle. I've heard Pound , and Olson, and Bly, I can hear their voices, but for Prince Hal or Macbeth I have to rely on a specific interpretation. We all have our favorites. Linda sets the bar for me, when it comes to Emily. As the evening wears on I realize I'm not going down to B's for dinner because the weather threatens and I don't want to get stuck down there. Wind and scudding clouds, far off thunder. It's not cold yet, but the temps are falling. I'm sure I'd have enjoyed the comradery, but I'm secure, wrapped in a blanket, my headlamp close at hand for when the power fails, reading about goat cheese. I'd rather not risk a driveway slick with wet leaves. Wet leaves are like goose shit, I swear. This morning, walking out to the woodshed, I slipped, but was saved from a fall by my mop-handle walking stick. That third leg. Joel would argue that I shouldn't be doing it at all, working that hard, physically, and Kim would argue that he couldn't wait to get the use back into that arm, so he could lay brick with both hands. I don't know. I'd rather be left alone.